Everyone wants a high self esteem, but many are unable to achieve it. It could be because of not being able to recognize your self-worth, having fear of failure, evaluation of yourself according to your past mistakes, or whatever it maybe.
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When you have a high self-esteem, you feel better about yourself and develop greater resilience. Resilience is basically the ability to bounce back from a setback like some trauma or failure and according to research, people with higher self esteem are more likely to overcome such issues.
“Confidence comes with maturity, being more accepting of yourself.”
–Nicole Scherzinger
Confident vs Narcissist
It is note-worthy that there is a big difference between having high self esteem and being a narcissist. The difference between the two is that, even though they have high self-confidence, they are entirely closed to negative feedback and are overly full of themselves. Confidence is good, but over-confidence is equally bad, as it makes you think that you are the best of the best and hence leaving no room for growth.
1. Right Use of Affirmations
One of the common optimistic affirmation would be that “I will be extremely successful” but there is one problem with that. When you make such statement, if your self esteem is low you will start to feel even less confident in yourself as it will be almost unrealistic for what you truly believe you are capable of.
Though it works great for people who already have high-self esteem and are looking to further improve it. When it comes to affirmations when your self-esteem is low, you should keep them to a certain degree where they seem more doable and more realistic.
Like instead if saying “I will be extremely successful” say “I will do my best to succeed”. This change of perspective will greatly help.
2. Discover Your Plus Points and Develop Them
The foundation of self esteem is built by identifying the things you take pride in or are interested in and proving yourself in it. Like if going are a good singer, participate in competitions.
If you are a good cook, invite your family and friends over and cook for them. When you do that, you will learn to find your importance and self-worth somewhere.
3. Accept The Praises you Receive
One thing people with low self esteem is that they have almost lost faith in themselves and so even when you genuinely do good job and get compliments you start to think that you don’t deserve them and that maybe they are complimenting you so you don’t feel bad.
The truth is you need to be able to accept compliments and know that you did something to deserve it. When you do that, your self-esteem will eventually improve.
One way to start accepting praising is to select a set of words to say (like, thanks a lot) when someone does so. This will spare you the awkwardness and you will get used to it pretty soon.
4. Stop Putting yourself Down
A critical thing about having low self esteem is that you start to bring it even lower by criticizing your every move and every decision. You need to be more self-compassionate. One big reason that you lose confidence is when you fail or are afraid of failing.
You need to understand that fear of failure has led to many people giving up on so many things on so many levels, you need to overcome it by being more resilient and instead of criticizing yourself for failing, work on it and grow from it.
5. Find and Accept Your Self-Worth
Make a list of things that are good about you. Think of the times you were really helpful to someone, think of times when you outsmarted someone, in short, make the list of all the things that make you feel good about yourself.
When you do that, you will start to understand that maybe tough times got the best of you and clouded the fact that you are capable of making things happen. It’s all in your head, but sometimes you just need to give yourself a little reminder.
In Conclusion
Remember, you are capable of doing anything you want. So, have some faith in yourself and never hesitate from anything you want. Your self esteem is not a stable thing. It can vary at any time, depending on what we feel about us in general, at the time of performance, and after the result. When things get specific, the impact on your self esteem gets highly dependent on it, like calling an athletic runner ‘slow’ will hurt the runner more as compares to if you say that to a non-athletic person.